theEweekly Wrap - Google, Mobile Marketing, Apple

A Google Webmaster Help thread has shed light on how often the search engine's spider crawl a website.

The Google Webmaster forum, which often sees employees hint at the inner-workings of the search process, explained that the search engine employs to index a website.

Google staffer John Mu revealed that the crawler responds to the update frequency of a sitemap.

"If we find new content there every time we crawl, we may choose to crawl more frequently," he wrote.

The news was also reported on SEO Roundtable earlier this week:

"This is pretty much how Google decides to crawl your pages. If you update your pages frequently and you have a normal PageRank, Google will likely crawl your web site more often."

Phoned in

Those working in online and digital marketing raised an eyebrow after it was revealed users in the US spend half of their mobile internet time on social networks.

The study, commissioned by Ground Truth, found around 60 per cent of mobile internet use was spent on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Time spent on portals, such as Google News, accounted for just under 14 per cent of mobile internet usage.

"While the popularity of mobile social networking is widely believed, this is the first time we have been able to truly quantify just how much the category is driving adoption of the mobile internet with actual usage metrics," said Evan Neufeld, vice president of marketing at the company.

The data, which was collected between March 28th and April 4 2010, was collected from 3.05 million individuals in the United States.

An Apple a day

In related mobile marketing news, Apple recorded a massive 90 per cent jump in profits over the previous three months. An incredible 8.75 million iPhones were sold across the globe between January and March, helping the company to increase its profits from $1.6 billion (£1.04bn) to $3.5 billion (£1.9bn). It was, according to head-honcho Steve Jobs, the best period (outside of Christmas) in the company's history.

The news comes as Apple prepares to launch the iPad in the UK. Preorders for the device, don't start until May 10th, although the sharp-eyes of Manchester SEOer Richard Frost have already spotted the option to run Google PPC adverts on the device.